• How World War I destroyed the American left: “The Espionage Act was equally conceived as a ‘club to smash left-wing forces.’ A vast network of spies and private detectives went to work infiltrating workplaces, union halls, and leftist gatherings in the hope of hearing disloyal talk and sowing disagreement. Strikes, work stoppages, and picket-line demonstrations were suddenly seen as evidence of enemy infiltration and suppressed even more violently than before…Emma Goldman, who drew thousands to rallies for her No-Conscription League, was arrested the very day that the Espionage Act went into effect, almost as though it had been designed for her.” (The New Republic)

• The tragedy from Henry I’s life that inspired a Game of Thrones storyline. (Smithsonianmag.com)

• Remembering Bruno Latour: “Earth, Gaia, is the ultimate obligatory passage point, the sine qua non of any mode of existence for humanity.” (The Nation)

• “Anna May Wong was basically ‘hashtag representation matters’ decades before Twitter was even invented.” (New York Times)

• Translating Tang poetry for the twenty-first century: “History is hound to Chinese poets…it beats like an extra heart.” (Poetry Foundation)

• Burning trapdoors, poisoned makeup, and assault: the cursed history of the set of The Wizard of Oz. (Far Out)

• Found: Hipparchus’ ancient star map, the oldest attempt to record fixed positions of more than eight hundred celestial bodies. (Vice)

• The tense, four-hundred-year history of Asian migrants in South America. (JSTOR Daily)

• Vladimir Nabokov in Berlin, searching “the kindly mirrors of future times” for a “sense of literary creation.” (Harper’s Magazine)

• A history of the first-person narrative: “The personal essay is a modern formation. It is a wholly different creature from the essay birthed by Montaigne in 1570 and nurtured through the seventeenth century by Sir Thomas Browne, Thomas Fuller, and Abraham Cowley. Each of these essayists is unwilling to disentangle the individual from the condition of man or nature, a commitment reflected by how their prose slides with graceful abandon through the various third-person singulars.” (The New York Review of Books)

• This week in obituaries: Carmen Callil, Robbie Coltrane, Benjamin Civiletti, Charles Sherrod, Robert Gordon, Derrick Greaves, Geoff Nuttall, Kelsang Gyatso, Charles Duncan Jr., Ralph DeNunzio, Theo Richmond, Ivy Jo Hunter, Franci Swanepoel, Jim Redmond, Mary Adelia McLeod, Bernard McGuirk, Mikaben, Noel Duggan, Bruce Sutter, Max Woodward, Roger Welsch, James McDivitt, Charley Trippi, and Eclipse.